skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29:

Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. (Physicists know this as the Kinetic theory.) Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms:

1. that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large
2. that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses

I believe we are already laying the "foundation for this study. Look at the market. The foundation of the market is us - our consumption (which I believe is ultimately unsustainable - but that's another discussion). At it's core, that's what the market is all about. Right now I suspect Goldman (and the other investment houses) have stopped trying to predict the market. They are trying to control the market. Which leads to many of the problems we have now.

Without accurate data, predictions, you can't completely control risk. So risk remains.

Anyway to answer your question; I just repeated the theory of Asimov and argued why I thought the theories of psychohistory were already in practice. Which of course they were, since everyone was trying to predict the course of the market; which meant predicting the course of the herd. So if you studied people (all of the people), you could win in the market.

But much of the market has changed in the last 20 years. I believe, today it's more about control then prediction.
When you want a 100% solution and Node gives you a 95% one that 5% can be a deal-breaker. Node is nearly there, which is frustrating because it has so much potential, but it's just not yet.

I think in the long run Node will beat the pants off of Rails but it's going to take an enormous amount of work to make that happen.
It's possible, but not trivial. Especially when the developer is using 100% event delegation, you have to run that node against all the potential selectors of parent elements...
ok. I think it's more worthwhile to spend that time trying to bring the company down, not wasting 1 guy's time, out of hundreds or perhaps thousands.
I went to a Christian school growing up, K-12. This is very much true. (Or at least the vocal Christians, the neocons/Pentecostals)

I'd also add that there's very much a persecution complex going on too: they believe that the world is out to get them, as Christians.

Be that "persecution" Harry Potter "encouraging witchcraft", a fear of RPG games ("these kids pretend they're wizards and cast actual spells!") to "they took the 10 commandments down in the courtroom - more proof of an evil, Godless country..."

The more they see these things the more they cry out, "help, help we're being repressed!" and then it bounces around the echo chamber and feeeds their belief as a whole.
Good for Chattanooga. My former employer bought a company there several years ago necessitating me traveling there about 10 times per year. Nice views, decent weather, clean city. Still hated traveling there though for some reason.
I've looked hard at using amazons gpu clusters, and the math just doesn't work out.

If you're working on applications that will need to be using the gpu regularly, you can build a system with 4 gtx580s for about $3,000, and one of those systems will outperform 2, maybe 3, aws gpu instances, which will run you about 1000 per month each. The ownership number does not include data center/power/etc., but I still think buying is better value if you'll be using it a lot.

Now, if you're running gpu jobs sporadically, aws may make sense, but you should really look carefully at this, it's not the same value relationship as hosting web servers on aws (which I'm a general proponent of).

Although, to be fair, that may change if they really do pass on some of their savings from this deal to the user.
Insights on the writing of Steve Jobs - Fortune Tech
Just for fun, another variant - separating logic from data and trying to be pretty stock python.

cases = [(3, "Fizz"), (5, "Buzz"), (7, "Bazz")]

for i in range(110):
pr = ''.join([v[1] * (i % v[0] == 0) for v in cases])
print pr or i
The difference between Gmail and Facebook is that Gmail did not aim to track who you correspond with. Facebook is focussed on personally identifiable information. They have made it their business from Day 1 to know who your correspondents (friends) are _and_ to exploit that for profit.

To my mind, this is not something Google set out to do. Although to compete with Facebook, I imagine they may have changed direction. We have Facebook to thank for that.

Let's imagine for a second that the future brings us the proverbial "video telephone" that even the most non-technical person expects to one day be standard issue. Crystal clear, real-time communication with both audio and video as available to every person as owning a cell phone is today. Now, hold that thought.

Should companies be invited into every conversation we have on this device? Should they be permitted to show ads to us as we converse?

We never had companies keeping a record of everyone who we telephone and listening in to our telephone conversation to try to figure out what junk postal mail to send us. Would this be different? How?

Ok, now we can return to present day reality. The question is: Where do we draw the line? Should companies be a party to every conversation? What will happen if we leave this question to the unscrupulous kids working and compromised adults working at Facebook? I doubt they would see anything wrong with what I described in the previous paragraph.
It must be extremely frustrating to have been an old-time HP engineer or product designer. To watch the company transition from an innovative technology company to a gigantic services and ink firm with no breakthrough products for, well, over a decade now. And to know that inside the walls of the company HP had early products that weren't too different from the iPhone, or even 3D printers, but made a conscious decision to do nothing with them and to effectively stop working on disruptive innovation.
The OP doesn't give an example of these questions.

If you're explaining the game of 'Go' to me and I stop you and say 'Tell me about a time you achieved success' then I would expect 100% of candidates to stop talking about Go and start answering the new question.

On the other hand if I stopped you and asked 'Why do you think the counters are black and white?' I expect 100% of candidates to give me an answer that's fairly short and then continue with their original answer.

I can't think of a single question that would separate people into two groups.
"The programmer should always have complete control", if the API is broke, the programmer has lost control.

From a security and usability perspective, the programmer must always be in ultimate control of what code is being executed. If it's "parameters", an API should be explicitly requesting any or all parameters, and completely ignoring unknowns. If the API is scanning for unknown parameters or even worse scanning for parameters to invoke variable named function calls (it happens a lot), at best; your API is wide open for attack. (This was a major attack vector in some Wordpress APIs in the recent past.) In the meantime, the unknown parameter just causes the program to break, and why would any programmer allow that if it's so easily preventable.
They would be derelict in their duty to NOT be very closely tracking the (open literature) state of the art in factorization. I.e., it's not a conspiracy, it's their job, and it always has been.

I also presume they have people working to keep abreast of the state of the art in secret work of other countries.
What about the LinkedIn app? Don't they use a lot of HTML(5) in their app?

Facebook just happens to be a big company that said HTML5 didn't work for them. For all we know they designed it wrong/optimized in the wrong way.

Saying web apps on mobile are a bad idea based on that doesn't make sense.
I don't know how many times I've read one of your comments and thought, "I should move to Pittsburg so I can work with this guy." Your sentiments about programming and what makes it so compelling resonate deeply with me.
Including Google and Facebook?
> How is Maybe not morally equivalent to a conditional?

Maybe is a way to represent conditionals that is amenable to higher order patterns. if-then-else conditionals are simply that, whereas Maybe is amenable to Monad, Monoid, and Applicative functor laws. So when we pull out mconcat or <> or mappend, we're actually talking about a higher order pattern.

As I mentioned in the article, we could take that same fizzbuzz code and modify it in many ways under the monoid rules. For example, a different harness in the main function could use Map String Integer and completely change the behavior with the same fizzbuzz function.
I'm the founder of Yacket. On monday we released our public beta. I've documented our metrics from the first 48 hours for posterity and interest. Feedback very welcome.
http://blog.yacket.com/post/32860220442/the-public-beta-48-h...
The tasting of the shrew
Some people just really, really liked Windows 2000 and they aren't giving up on it.
>When I said creative, I meant creative use of language. Yes, memes are extraordinarily popular in forums like Slashdot, Reddit and HN. But I only attribute creativity to the person who created the meme, not the ones who use it incessantly... unless they use it in some creative way, as you did (if indeed you were making a joke).

Well, I was. I see your pain in a way, I myself have some pet peeves when it comes to language. This particular case I found innocent enough, like using stock phrases like "shit hits the fan" or "out of your league", "to die for", etc.

While I get that part about the person who created the meme being the most creative, meme's get their power and significance from repetition. It's kind of a "network effect", where the more people use the same meme, the more impact it gets in conveying its message. In essence it's like proverb creation, only now we get to track it in real time through the internet.
My dealer sent me something in the (snail) mail declaring love to. I need to take my car in for a service that will cost $600 or so. They have been absolutely determined to make that as difficult as possible - eg online forms that don't work, emails that aren't answered, a general 'contact us' form on their website that turned out to go to their sales department who started spamming me and the list goes on.
Police will likely be clueless.

You might file a civil suit against John Doe for fraud.

Then you might subpoena the ISP to tell you who is using the IP.

Then maybe go the police with the evidence from your civil case.
Maybe I'm missing something, but you'll find attached Event Listeners at the very bottom-right of the Elements panel, under where (Computed) Styles, Metrics, Properties, and DOM Breakpoints are found.
The .NET framework is more than just a bit of COM plumbing.
>the sun beams a total of 120,000 terrawatts per day onto our planet. That's 10,000 times the amount that flows through our industrial civilization.

Should be "terrawatts", not "terrawatts per day". (I stopped reading there. There 100s of 1000s of people who know enough physics never to make such a mistake. I'll read one of them instead.)
Danger is if your friends don't have similar filters and expose your drunk indiscretions
What this article talks about is more than a year old. When I was looking for a tool to start my project I was at the same distance to Python, Ruby and NodeJS and their ecosystem. So when I read about it a year ago I leaned towards NodeJS. So knowing the experience of others always help to certain people at certain point of their yet to unfold story but not to everybody all the time.

I am not unhappy with my choice but I do not have enough data to compare with other tools. I do not think a lot of people have either. Once you start with a tool you tend to keep it since you invested a lot of time learning it as well as developing something with it. I think few can afford switching tools (e.g. FB switched from HTML5 to native recently for their mobile interface).
> By any reasonable definition, every integer is closer to 0 than infinity.

Perhaps, but originally we weren't discussing 0, we are starting with an arbitrarily large number. This problem is exacerbated when you say:

> I disagree that increasing "exponentially"... is always faster ... Both versions have the same worst-case running time

Worst case, sure, but how do you compute average? You could take a selection of n number of integers from 0 to infinity and the number of guesses until you found the correct answer, but of course you can't do this because you can't easily get a random number to test with that is between 0 and infinity. That said, it is fairly clear that x * x is faster than 2x is faster than x+1, but you can only prove this to be true once you pick an arbitrary limit less than infinity -- and the benefits of the better algorithm are only evident as you approach infinity.

Seems like a catch 22. Perhaps there is some expert in set theory as applied within computer science that can provide the appropriate formal context for determining the better algorithm in this context.

As for O notation, it is an interesting tool but one that has no application within any realm of actual programming in which I have worked, and I have never bothered to learn it simply to dazzle people in algorithm-based interviews (perhaps because I do more nuts and bolts type work rather than optimization).
Nasa releases stunning image of Helix nebula
It's interesting, but a bit like trying to detect a large and advanced by looking for products of horse manure decomposing in huge heaps. I think it was Mendeleev who thought that getting rid of horse shit will be the main problem of ever-growing cities in XX century.

The need for energy is definite, but the amount and character of such need is debatable. Maybe civilizations shrink and don't use so much energy? Maybe they mine million of stars at once? Maybe they get their energy out of thin vacuum?
Not what I mean. I am thinking in terms of proving discrimination etc.
That's why I said it was not personal. I just randomly chose this one random post in one random thread. There are hundreds to choose from.

Anyway, I'm over it. Maybe using these oft repeated phrases serves some purpose.

Your last sentence made me laugh again. Was that intentional? Are you poking fun at me?

If I took these phrases about what other's are thinking seriously, then everyone in web forums apparently knows what everyone else is thinking. Like they're clairvoyant or something.

I never presume to know what anyone else is thinking. If I want to know, then I ask them.
Simple way of predicting a country's future prosperity
Facebook has 1 billion users, it’s time to leave
Your Facebook Fans Are Hiding Your Posts At An Alarming Rate
App speed matters some. But not nearly as much as a lot of other things. And when speed is the biggest problem, your users can tell you and the fixes are pretty straightforward.

The hard things to solve require a lot of user-facing iteration. Basically, the faster you can try new things, the more likely you'll get product-market fit before you run out of money.

My feelings on Rails are decidedly mixed, but fast prototyping is one of the things they got right.
Who Wants to Marry an... Entrepreneur? (Indian Style)
HN Challenge:

Make a URL shortener service which allows you to send a link to someone from within facebook - but it blocks all known FB domains and IPs from viewing said URL.

It will only take the first click on it then expire. if all the first clicks are from FB - it would mean that FB is pre-emptively scanning and tracking all URL messages - even before users actually visit.
It's baffling. Human mimicry I guess. At least I know there are some people reading this stuff who also see it as strange as I do.
Python: under 90 characters and no explicits if statements

for i in range(100):print ''.join([s*(i%m==0)for m,s in[(3,"Fizz"),(5,"Buzz")]])or i
Alex here from TNW - yeah, that sounds right. Will take a look when I get a second and try to add it in.
Yes, that was what I was saying. Given the steep writedown in less than a year, I doubt that OMGPOP hit its targets that would have earned it its full earn out. I could elab, but I really think that statement makes sense?
EXACTLY

Although I still believe google tracks this covertly, FB is overt about it.
Half of what we know is wrong: on the half-life of facts in the modern age
I will pay you if you build an iLisp.
I want to make iPhone apps in a succinct language.
Amazon are also well-known for running things at a loss for years while an idea gets entrenched. It could be that they're prepared to eat a loss for a couple of generations just to popularize the idea of cloud-based HPC.

They might not run their hardware at a profitable capacity right now, but in 3-4 years when some labs are looking at replacing/updating their current systems, they will look at Amazon as an solid alternative and then things will turn up. And until then they can't half-ass it with too low capacity because when labs do some trial projects, if they come back with a "sorry we're out of instances" error, they'll decide they can't trust Amazon.
> It's harsh, but whenever I see Zynga's stock dip even lower its reassuring due to the signal it sends to smart people: what you work on matters.

I don't follow your logic here.

You're implying that the work done at Zynga is non-important, or is some how bad.

But plenty of smart people work at "important" world changing places and never hit huge success.

Plenty of smart people work at "non-important" places and end up hitting it big (like most year-old startup being acqhired these days).
Ad Industry Calls IE10's 'Do Not Track' Setting 'Unacceptable'
On second read, that's not the post I had in mind. Much love to @CD, but I think it was a Fred Wilson post that I have in mind.
This is the main issue with trying to catalogue event handlers. Backbone.js, and savvy jQuery developers won't use bind for any sort of dynamic pages, because it's too hard to track handlers and make sure they're rebound properly as the DOM updates. The best solution is to use .on, which generally (argument specific) will set up a listener on a PARENT element of the selector you've put in.

.live() .delegate() and (usually) .on() will leave the handler on a parent node, making sniffing out all active handlers an expensive DOM-walking task.
Can you get in the zone with people watching and judging you intently? If you can't get into the zone with only a couple of people watching you, how will you get into the zone when the whole company is depending on your bug fix?

The pressure of judgement is not the same as the work pressure of a stressful scenario. It's why public speaking and job interviews are among the most feared activities people go through, but people consider meetings boring and mundane.
If you can nudge him into sharing in public, that would be grand.
Inbox - roy.c328gmail.com - Gmail
You've never used ReST but you somehow know it's not good for typesetting research papers?
You could use phone gap, and compile you lisp to JavaScript with something like http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/
why post this on hackernews?
We're like, philosophers of the mundane.
Sure, they could have their own nuclear fusion reactors or even something more sophisticated, but why let a perfectly good source of energy just go to waste?

I don't think they'd care that anyone could detect them if they're that advanced...
Why can't you find out the same information about the persion by just engaging in normal conversation, asking them about their interests, and asking reasonable follow up questions?

Presenting it as some kind of weird test that makes the interviewee feel awkward and suspicious is no way to conduct an interview. It says more about how bad the interviewer is.
And the accompanying tools for it: https://github.com/nvie/gitflow
Think of that "cornering" as more of a bailout.
Along the same lines was Diaspora, which ended up being a spectacular failure, but not before garnering a huge amount of attention.

This is not true. Diaspora is not a failure.
>I have used a lot of tools to manage my TODO lists, I even wrote one (Taskr - Simple command line utility to manage your tasks). However, I keep coming back to pen and paper. I think I get it now, The biggest drawback of the Todo list apps I've used was that they made managing my Todo lists easy. As a result of which my lists started growing. When I use pen and paper, I have to copy everything to a new page every single day, and THAT is NOT easy. It makes me think which task is worth copying. At the end of the day, this is what makes my todo lists sane. I think I am going to stick to pen and paper for my Todo lists for a long time.
http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/17/why-todo-lists-on-paper-wo...
because we have laptops and there is a high correlation that HN is a fan of Louis C.K.

On another note, I had to stop reading the article because every other sentence is a metaphor.
I had to reply... more than a comment, an entire blog post :)
http://blog.maclawran.ca/hell-yeah-hacking-at-50
As someone who once considered biting into it - thank you, this is a great insight! (I decided against it as I kind of sensed something unattractive and left it at that!)
http://call-cc.org/

http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P...
All I got from him on the topic over txt was that he never spoke to him :(
That's a problem with your friend, not with Facebook. As someone wiser than me once said, "you can't opt-out of people talking about you on the Internet"
To my mind it does. I'm contributing something to G+

But I think that to Google - the fact I log into GMAIL makes me an active G+ user.
"Finally, a Geek is a Circus worker who bites the heads off of live chickens. For decades it was used as a severe insult, often preceding a beatdown by jocks. The term has been reclaimed by creative intellectuals among themselves, but is always a term of derision on some level when used by those outside this group, comparable to the n word with african americans and the d and f words in the gay and lesbian communities. Programs such as "Hunt the Geek" I find to be intrinsically insulting and disrespectful."

While I find the use of the term "geek" in this sense to annoying and dismissive, I'd rather the geek community not adopt yet another victim culture looking for insults where they aren't. Especially given that on average we are actually better off financially than the typical American.
Sending emails from Powershell using SQL Server 2012
No, but they do have Wi-Fi and most people's wi-fi access point-based geolocation databases are pretty good. I'd be surprised if it didn't present a reasonably accurate location (assuming the victim could get that info). It's very likely the thief lives in a population-dense area and is near at least one access point.
refer.ly just dropped the ball on this one.
You sound a bit bitter.

Anyone relocating to the south should realize that you are moving into the bible belt. This is not California, and this is not New York. Please don't make the mistake that just because people think that behavior that is socially accepted in other parts of the US/World is reprehensible that they are automatically stupid. Stupid knows no boundaries, it's all over the place.

As for being shafted, in my experience, many real estate agents are generally trying to make as quick a buck as they can and will, given half a chance, shaft everyone involved in the transaction.

Otherwise, I generally agree with you.